Interesting Links for 22-03-2012
Mar. 22nd, 2012 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- We finally understand what electroconvulsive therapy does
- Symbian smartphone share drops below Winows Phone. Less than 5% in total.
- Who wants to go into space in a Star Tram?
- Are you a smoker pissed off by the tax increase? Here's an alternative...
- Dear Scum: An Open Letter To The Sun
- Met Police lose report pointing out how badly they handle rape cases.
- Manchester's tube train that never was
- Autism risk gene linked to differences in brain structure
- An official petition to put Alan Turing on the next £10 note
- Which Search Engine's Users Are The Most Racist?
- Behind Every Great Woman...
- Introducing a non-gamer to roleplaying. I really liked this.
- Ordinary Batman Adventures
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 12:26 am (UTC)That it was still beating iOS in sales in the tail end of 2011 was sacry wrong given how long it'd been cancelled.
Heh, new Symbian Belle update has an improved low power mode. Prioritise 2G, only go online when I ask it to, I can get 8-10 days battery life in my N8...
no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 11:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 11:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 12:20 pm (UTC)Space Trams
Date: 2012-03-22 01:44 pm (UTC)… you remember that by 2050 there will be some 10 billion people living on Earth and at least half of them will have a standard of living equal to or more than the per capita GDP of the USA when it built the Space Shuttle (or failing that Apollo(2))
And that if 1 person in 100 of the those 10 billion spent just 1% of their per capita GDP on stuff that happens in space(3) that is about $21bn per annum on space stuff
And this thing should last 100 years.
$60bn to drop the cost of cost of getting stuff up there by a factor of 200 for a hundred years.
Basically, building a Space Tram is pocket change…
…until…
… you ask an Edinburgh cabby about trams.
Time to put SpaceTram on kickstarter.
(1) $26k in 2005 US$
(2) $21k in 2005 US$
(3) be that GPS sats, com sats, spy sats, medical research, charitable or state giving to pure research, Big Brother in Space entertainment.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 06:05 pm (UTC)It's a bit like saying "if we have a working He3 aneutronic fusion reactor" -- theoretically possible, but oy are there some minor engineering problems in the way!
no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 10:07 pm (UTC)I was thinking the Northern Territory would be a better location.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 10:09 pm (UTC)Or the corrosive power of penguin crap?
no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-23 12:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 12:06 pm (UTC)And even if you poke your railgun muzzle up into the stratosphere, you're going to need a heat shield on your payloads because the frictional heating of punching through air (even at 10% of ground level pressure) at Mach 20 is not insubstantial.
Edit: There is a place where this scheme might be practical, of course ... on Mars, specifically up the flank of Olympus Mons. At the summit you're near-as-dammit in hard vacuum, and you don't need anything like as long a run-up anyway because orbital velocity on Mars is a lot lower than on Earth.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 07:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-15 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-15 10:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-15 07:09 pm (UTC)